SilverbladeTE wrote:Oh, when I refered to China having no colonies, I meant in the SAFEHOLD universe it had no colony
worlds!
Which iirc is mentioned in TFT? and is rather odd
By that point, Earth had a world government, and colonies would be
Terran Federation colonies. There might have been colonies whose primary settlers were ethnic Chinese, but ethnicity != nationality. The idea of the nation state as a contiguous geographic area inhabited primarily by an ethnically homogeneous group speaking a common language is a relatively recent notion, historically speaking.
If China at that point is no longer a nation-state, but rather something like a province of a greater polity, can you properly speak of a Chinese colony? I don't personally think so, but the point can be argued either way, and comes back to what you mean by colony.
The fact that folk wonder why North Harchong was settled is mentioned several times in the books...this maybe foreshadowing
It may well be, We don't know what the process was that determined where the original enclaves were placed. It's possible (though I think it unlikely), that enclaves were deliberately scattered without attempts to make them all decent places to start from. Successfully expanding from the original enclave in North Harchong and taking over as much territory as the Harchong Empire eventually did was a challenge that produced a very hardy people, and that may have been the point.
South Harchong had Yu-Kwai (spelling?) Which we know was originally "New York"
But as I mentioned previously, I don't think anything should be read into that choice of name.
If the conflict was triggered by something as minor as petty jealousy, or a mistaken belief of bias or some such, well, that would fit.into Human Nature and the Demon Murphy! :p
Europeans had wars over pathetic scraps of "nothing much" in Africa as example, like 5 year olds over a toy or.blanket
Indeed, save that it's really hard to consider large slices of Africa as "nothing much". A good bit of the reason for European colonies in Africa revolved around access to resources not present in Europe.
And the earlier Spanish colonies in the New World were partly about access to gold and silver. In those days, economies were mercantilist, wealth was gold, and you got it by taking it away from someone else. Spain actually found gold (and more important, silver), and managed to crash their economy a couple of times by introducing too much, too fast. They failed to realize a major part of precious metal's value was scarcity, and the more there was circulating, the less valuable any given amount would be.
There could also be a darker purpose, such as using Langhorne's reprogramming as means to eventually control for a specific religion, government or whatever.
High risk of fanatic or agent suborning the project, which is another reason why Langhorne's warping things was so stupid and dangerous as it removed more safeguards from criminal/psychotic sabotage
I think we can agree Langhorne did a poor job of thinking things through.
As said every group has its nuts and extremists, so Chihiro may have acted from petty motives blown worse due to stress etc, or he could have planned all this from way back as an agent of government/religion/group or just as singular egotistical drive.
At a con, RFC said Chihiro had been a senior government official and a historian back on Earth. We know he was working to undermine Langhorne and supplant him as Administrator. Kau Yung's nuke provided a leadership gap Chihiro was happy to step into, and he was already Assistant Adminstrator and second in legal command.
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Dennis
